The King Of UK Comparison Shopping

If there is one industry that has had more articles written about it on forums and discussion boards and does not require another word said about it, it is the Price Comparison Shopping industry. Millions of words have been spent analysing, dissecting and often desecrating all of the major players in the field and, boy, are there plenty of players. In the US there seems to be some autonomy emerging with the Shopping.com and ShopZilla behemoths still number one for sheer merchant count, visitor reach and backing. With squillions of lesser sites popping up everyday vying for a slice of this lucrative “dollar-cake” (some even powered by the main players), trying to breathe new life into the price comparison concept has proven a struggle. In the UK a similar pattern is emerging, in respect to the millions of comparison sites emerging only. The big difference though, in my opinion, is that the ‘King of comparison shopping’ in the UK has yet to be crowned.

What would one look for in a good ‘price comparison’ King, if we were to crown one today?

Honesty – In other another words ‘transparency’. In this day and age of Urchin/Google Analytics even bedroom-ran businesses can see where their traffic is coming from and how many of their clicks are genuine and fair. Many merchants I know do still feel aggrieved with a lot of the comparison sites for still having outdated validation logic to calculate genuine clicks. PriceGrabber are probably the most honest out of them all and have a list as long as your arm (they invalidate clicks made by their own staff… gee, thanks) but I am sure they can do better. They invalidate duplicate clicks made within 30 seconds of each other on the same product, but I feel that is quite tight. Surely if someone finds your product on PG in the morning and then retraces their steps through PG in the evening, they should not have to pay for the same lead. Also if a browser with an IP based in Nigeria (no offence to my Nigerian brothers in need of a new top-of-the-range laptop) clicks on your store, you should not have to pay for the lead? The only company who delivers honesty in this area is CheckCost whose foreign policy is very xenophobic and excludes all clicks from IP’s based outside of the United Kingdom. They also give stores 24 hours breathing space between clicks made by the same browser on the same product.

Fair Rule – There is no doubt that when it comes to money and riches, most contenders for the crown are not bereft of short-change. Take Shopping.com, for example. Bought by eBay for a £500m in 2005 you would have considered them to be perfect and the coronation parties had already been arranged, I had even bookmarked them in Mozilla and were always my first port of call when checking prices. But suddenly it all went wrong for them. Greed & power took hold and they began to forget about their subjects (i.e. the merchants). The amount of money being siphoned from their subject’s CPC budgets and into Shopping’s coffers came under intense scrutiny and they had a bloody revolution on their hands which saw merchants turn on Shopping in their droves. To this day they have not recovered and a search for the latest Sony LCD TV limply shows only a thimbleful of merchants still loyal to them. Compared to other sites this is woeful and they do not even have the cheapest prices on display. For the same Sony LCD TV I found 27 sellers on this site who also have the cheapest price on the internet.

Legacy – Once a King is crowned I feel the lasting legacy will be based on simplicity. I have seen comparison sites in the United States using Flash to build a virtual mall (failed!), comparison sites rewarding the buyer with a slice of the affiliate payment if purchased via them (also failed!) and many other wayward and uninspiring ideas. With these brainwaves (albeit broken waves) still floating around the ether I came up with a new notion… how about a comparison site which gives you the cheapest price from every online store in the UK? Instead of Featured Merchants paying their way to the top of the listings why not sort all of the merchants by price? It may sound obvious but no-one seems to be doing it right in the UK yet, so the crown is still for the taking over the next few years.